On the subject of sniping: It is a reality in the online auction world, and as such, there is little way around it. Besides, it is not something I necessarily discourage, given that I've done it a few times on eBay in the past (before they had robots from the future doing it, who will crush us all someday in their great rebellion). So I understand the negativity some people have with it.
The best way around it is to have an open window with your highest bid amounts open in a new tab, ready to deploy your salvos of dollar-atons at ground zero. Then you just hope for the best (and that your enemy doesn't have an Overlord or Observer).
On the subject of countdown times: I tried to keep it as close to real time as possible. I cannot make up for the discrepancies that the intermotrons "afford" me - there will always be lag to the servers and routers my ping has to travel through.
What I can say is that if you took a stopwatch and timed based on when I updated with a "X minutes left" post, it was damn near close as possible to being accurate. Ten minutes out, if you whipped out a watch, it would have been eerily close. It was all I could do and the best I could do. For example, at the "ten minutes remain" mark, if you accounted for, say, ten seconds of lag difference, then getting your highest bids in at nine minutes and fifty seconds after that would have been damn close to final tally.
Toward the end there, about six minutes left, a slew of bids appeared. I remember being in the middle of some from Jack and seeing time slipping away. I couldn't finish updating as much as I would have liked - I had to stop and update with a "ONE MINUTE LEFT!" post. So I stopped, saved what I had done, and focused on waiting to announce the final minute. I even debated making a "fifteen seconds left!" post, but that would have put me thirty seconds at the worst beyond the time I said we'd end, so I didn't. I figured that last minute was time enough warned, and that if someone had planned ahead, they'd know to not put a bid in after that UNLESS they were absolutely sure it was their highest.
So I do apologize if some people feel annoyed or screwed out of something - those are the breaks, made as cleanly as possible given my A) humanity and B) reality, which are two things I can only wrestle with so long and so far before my strength gives out and I am resolved to their conclusions.
Now then, I want to make it clear
that I have already lobbied for an official countdown BB Code tag to be implemented in the forum. Yes, I should have done it a week ago, or two weeks ago, or whatever, but I have asked for one. It would serve us great utility for lowball auctions, and even has further use elsewhere around the site - say, for when deals go live or dead, for special events like watching our own JimmieMac compete in Hell's Kitchen, and so on so forth.
Other forums have this tag enabled, and there's most likely no reason we can't as well. I don't want to pressure John the Super Programmer too much - he's damn awesome at what he does and a tireless work horse - but that doesn't mean we can't ask for it anyway.
So, if anyone wants to (and I encourage you wholeheartedly), you should head into the thread and voice your support. It'll be like a petition sort of thing, and while those generally never work in the online world, there's no reason we can't try.
So hey, want to improve lowballs? There's at least a potential answer - post up!
Lastly, I want to express - though I already have, as well as others have on my behalf repeatedly within the last hour - that I tried my damndest as best I could to keep this fair, transparent, out in the open, and absolutely clear to everyone.
To give sufficient proof of this, here's a screenshot of my current desktop.
See all those Word documents in the middle? Those are copies of the OP as I was updating it. Everytime I added to it for the last two hours, I saved it up until the latest post locally. That way, if we crashed or had "no available nodes" errors or something, I had backups. Further, any mistakes that were getting fixed as I updated would be able to be historically followed, since you could compare all the text (if you really wanted to - they are ten pages long with 8 point font with the page setup at 0.3 inch borders all around, making for a huge amount of text per page).
The point here is that I'm committed to making everyone happy as best I can by being as fair as possible. At some point, there's nothing else I can do, and here it was simply not being able to update as quick as I wanted, nor being able to provide an absolute countdown timer.
So I apologize if you got sniped, outbid legitimately, forgot to bid, forgot about this thread, felt cheated due to time confusion, attacked by Cookie Monster, etc. I had no less than ten people PM me asking what time zone I was in and when it ended and so forth, and I answered each one of them faithfully and quickly. That was in spite of having the information in the OP, counting down with title updates and posts, even going as far as to repeatedly say where I was in terms of time zone.
This is because they had a question that was legit to them, and the best way to handle it is to answer it - not shun them away or being asinine with a "WELL DUH IT'S RIGHT HERE" response.
The point is that this is the best I could do. I'm not being defensive - I just want to make all of it clear. Hell, I wish I had ten thousand of everything and could send them all out for free with five bucks stapled inside to a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket, but I sadly cannot do any of that.
So, I hope you enjoyed yourself, I hope this has been a positive experience for all involved, and I hope you all understand.
Thank you so much everyone. This really was a fantastic trip, and even though I'm settling down from the adrenaline, it's still quite a rush. :]
Sincerely,
Strell
). However, I managed to get a higher bid in for one of those sealed Descents. He outbid me on all the DC games I wanted for my sealed collection, though. No big deal.[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
Do I still get that Mario 3 guide if I pay shipping then?[/QUOTE]
ing years its been missing for!! And I am serious when I say I've questioned where it disappeared too at least once every month, lmao.
